I can get my FICO score for 16 bucks. Is this something I 'should' do?Personally, I think checking your credit score - unless you happen to be about to buy a house immediately or something (and even then, I personally didn't do it) to be a big waste of money and a boondoggle. You can't do much to change it except to behave sensibly over time with finances and so I'm not sure what good it does to know it.

What is VERY useful, and that you should be doing at least once a year, is to check your credit report(s). The link below is the only site you can get them 100% free without paying anything. You are entitled to get them free once a year from each of the three agencies, and you don't have to do all three at one time. Many people - myself included - do one of the three every few months, so over the course of a year you can review it 3x. Each is slightly different and they may all have slightly different info. But the key thing is to see there are no errors, and to see what it flags as items that you need to take care of (old charged off debt, etc). If there are errors, you can dispute them and get them removed. I once had a judgement show up on mine that was for a completely different person, and it was easy to get removed. You can also flag any potential ID theft by reviewing the report (that's harder to deal with).

This is the only legitimate free service. All the others say "free with trial" or some nonsense like that.

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